20 YEARS OF THE ISS

With each sunrise we awake and go about our daily lives with little thought that 400km above Earth, a group of humans are living in an orbiting laboratory. Travelling at 27,600km per hour, they see 16 sunrises a day and make one orbit around our planet in just 90 minutes. There are generations growing up today who have only known a time when the human race lived both on and off planet Earth.

For the past 20 years there has been a continuous human presence in space on the International Space Station (ISS). It began two decades ago this month when, on 2 November 2000, the crew of Expedition-1 - US astronaut William ‘Bill’ Shepherd, and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko - docked their Soyuz spacecraft with the ISS, climbed through the hatch